11/12/2004 @ 10:39AM

Cary Grant, Ever More Notorious

It’s probably inevitable that a biography of Cary Grant is going to produce at least some small degree of disillusionment. Throughout his lifetime, Grant tried, if not always successfully, to keep his private life closely guarded, especially by today’s standards of celebrity overexposure. But since his death in 1986 he has become fair game for any author willing to dig up the most intimate and unflattering details about the man behind the celebrated screen image. And since that image was one of idealized male perfection, the real man has to suffer by comparison. “Everyone wants to be Cary Grant,” he famously said. “Even I want to be Cary Grant.”

Still, when a new Grant biography is as warts-and-all as Marc Eliot‘s Cary Grant (Harmony Books, $25.95), you have to wonder about the author’s intent. The question is particularly puzzling since Eliot’s book is the product of a self-admitted fan who says in an afterward that he became “hooked” on Grant after he first saw Alfred Hitchcock‘s North by Northwest as a boy. Eliot’s carefully footnoted biography appears to be the result of meticulous research, which he says he spent five years doing. Having concluded that previous writings on Grant were “hopelessly inaccurate,” Eliot means to set the record straight.

No doubt, a complete and unvarnished portrait of Grant is a legitimate aim for any biographer. The problem is that Eliot’s book, while full of praise for Grant’s achievements onscreen, seems to have an excessive interest in dwelling on the troubled aspects of his private life, sometimes to the point of reveling in them. Eliot’s reverence for his subject doesn’t stop him from assiduously documenting Grant’s real-life flaws in such detail that they begin to overwhelm everything else.

Which is unfortunate, because Grant’s story, otherwise well-told here, is a compelling one, filled with personal drama. Grant, born a Cockney named Archie Leach, managed to escape his oppressive, working-class origins in England after a difficult childhood that involved the loss of one parent and abandonment by the other. He found salvation, and a way out, in show business, first in England and then in the United States. His rise, which was far from immediate, included stints in vaudeville and on the legitimate stage before he finally landed in the movies. Even then, it took him years to find his now-familiar onscreen identity, as he suffered through a stretch of empty “tuxedo roles” in a series of mediocre films.

Once he broke through, he defined a major portion of movie history, pursuing a career that reflected the glories, failings and miseries of the Hollywood studio system. Grant was both a star product of that system and a courageous, groundbreaking rebel against it, as Eliot astutely points out. Early in his career, Grant rejected exclusive studio contracts to go freelance, and he later became a successful producer of his own movies. By the end of his career he had made films for all the major studios: Paramount, RKO, MGM, Columbia, 20th Century Fox, Universal and Warner Bros. But the significance of his work as an actor is sometimes buried under the enormous fame he enjoyed, and his gifts were not necessarily well used in each of his 72 films. Critic David Thomson has called him “the best and most important actor in the history of the cinema,” a rather startling judgment even to Grant admirers, but one that Eliot may share.

What made Grant stand out was his brilliance in romantic comic parts during the classic “screwball comedy” era from the mid-’30s until 1940 and His Girl Friday (probably Grant’s peak comedic performance), and in his later collaborations with Hitchcock. Eliot covers this ground competently, if not with any unique insights. He convincingly shows that Grant created a new type of leading man: sophisticated, yet a master of broad physical comedy and farce; confidently romantic, but a little aloof; and pursued by women rather than the pursuer.

That character’s creation, however, would never have happened if Grant hadn’t had the good fortune to work with such gifted directors as Leo McCarey (The Awful Truth), Howard Hawks (Only Angels Have Wings, His Girl Friday) and George Cukor (Holiday, The Philadelphia Story). In effect, they made him “Cary Grant.” Later, in such films as Suspicion and Notorious, Hitchcock further developed that persona–and resurrected Grant’s career–by bringing out a dark side that, Eliot maintains, mirrored the director’s own obsessions.

Eliot’s analysis of the important Grant films is well informed, if sometimes tangled up in abstractions. But what really concerns him is the contrast between the fabricated image onscreen and the person playing those parts. Much of his biography reveals how an insecure Grant struggled to understand who he was when his own life seemed so much at odds with the glamorous, self-assured figures he portrayed. The book’s introduction promises to show a successful journey toward self-discovery in which Grant came to prefer the reality of own life to the unreality of his film work and the spectacular fame it brought him.

That promise seems to get lost in the descriptions of the personal difficulties Grant confronted to the end of his life. His now well-known bisexuality, which Eliot covers in depth, not only caused problems for Grant in his private relationships but also threatened his early movie career. Eliot writes about Grant’s four failed marriages (his well-publicized divorce from Dyan Cannon produced scandalous revelations), collaborations with J. Edgar Hoover‘s FBI (Grant actually spied on his second wife, Barbara Hutton), experiments with LSD, his pursuit of young women when he was elderly and even his cheapness. Eliot suggests that to survive as a young performer in New York City, Grant may have done “escort” work that went beyond escorting socialites to fancy events.

Cary Grant is a serviceable biography that covers all the bases and will probably satisfy most readers who are curious to learn about Grant, as long as they don’t mind some icon tarnishing. As an alternative, you can get a good enough overview of his life–and a deeper understanding of his onscreen achievements–in other writings, notably the biographical essays by film critics Richard Schickel (in Cary Grant: A Celebration) and Pauline Kael (in For Keeps). These writers spare Grant the dirt and focus on the not always apparent complexities that underlie the charming, witty performances. Eliot’s biography is more of a tell-all, and it probably tells more than most Grant admirers would want to know.

Bruce Janicke is an editor at Forbes.com.

More From Forbes

More book reviews by Bruce Janicke:

Music Mogul Meltdown 07.20.04
Walter Yetnikoff made rock music pay off big, but he paid dearly for his own rock-star excesses.

All In Good Time 06.24.04
Jonathan Schwartz sounds sunny on the radio but strikes some bluesy notes in his memoir.